LKY ON TIANANMEN

Lee Kwan Yew (Singapore's former PM, former Senior Minister and now Minister Mentor) hasn't said anything that I disagreed with in quite a while - leading me to believe that he was acquiring a libertarian streak in his old age.

Yesterday, speaking at an Asian branding conference, he let go a piece of his personal wisdom reminding me why I didn't agree with him throughout most of the eighties and nineties. Not only has Lee defended the Tiananmen massacre, it seems would gladly have defended it had the Communists killed several hundred times more people than they did.:

'I hold unconventional views about this,' he said at the business conference, 'therefore I am not a great favourite of the Western media. I do not believe that if you are libertarian, full of diverse opinions, full of competing ideas in the market place, full of sound and fury, therefore you will succeed.
'If that were so, many countries that I know of, that would qualify on those counts, would be marvellously successful and prosperous.'
He was speaking to about 1,000 business leaders from all over the world at the Raffles City Convention Centre, and wasted no time to drive home his point.
Using China as an example, he asked rhetorically if the world's rising economic power would be better off today, if the students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 had overthrown the government and built a thriving democracy.
'I didn't think so then, and I don't think so now,' he replied.
Commenting on Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's decision then, he added: 'He took over and he said, 'If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it'.'

Even if one were to accept the need for 'order' above 'democracy,' the problem here is that Lee assumes that the Chinese Communist Party has brought a beneficial order to that country.

While there have been human and economic benefits since Deng's reforms, these have happened because the party has (somewhat) relinquished its grip on the Chinese economy. The Communist party is not a source of order or 'rule of law' but it remains at the heart of a corrupt and oppressive system.

Tiananmen was a peaceful protest that was crushed by tanks and machine guns. Deng was protecting his Communist party cronies and not the interests of China.

Arguing for incrementalism in the shift to liberal democracy is acceptable, arguing for the murder of 200 000 students is not. Many of the protesters at Tiananmen were not seeking a Western 'free-for-all' style of democracy. Most would have been happy with a system where corrupt officials would have been punished - a system like that of Singapore or Hong Kong, where there is a bit of "law" with the "order."

Lee, who was instrumental in getting rid of corruption in Singapore, should realize that.